Not Learning Japanese

After over a year and two previous feeble attempts to learn Japanese, I have started, yet again, to take lessons in the hope that I will actually be able to have a conversation where no pointing or pantomime is necessary. Unfortunately, I am not holding out much hope, as I am beyond bad when it comes to learning languages. I actually failed high school Spanish and had to go to summer school where I barely passed. Hard as I try to memorize vocabulary, days of the week and numbers, the words leave my mind just as soon as I think I've got it.

There is a particular type of torture involved in learning Japanese. Tops on the list is the counting system - there are over ten different ways to count, depending on what you are counting. Take the number 5 - one could say "go" for the actual number, if you were telling someone your phone number; "itsu-tsu" if you were asking for 5 cookies in a bakery; "itsuka-kan" if you were referring to the number of days, etc., etc., etc. There is a different word to be used if you are talking about people, age, thin or long objects, cups, books, minutes, weeks, months - the list goes on and on.

Various words are used to say "thank you" and "I'm sorry", depending on who you are talking to, and just how thankful or sorry you are. And then come the words themselves, constructed of little bits intended to confound anyone trying to figure it all out.

And let's not even get started in the actual reading of this most complicated language - there are three different written alphabets I will need to learn - and to make it worse, they can all be used in the same sentence!!

Friends of mine who have lived here for years and whose work involves speaking Japanese just started taking a class in formal Japanese, as that is an entirely different language!!

Worst of all is the amount of space you need in your brain for all of this new information. It seems my brain is full - in order to remember anything, I need to forget a bunch of stuff. So, if the next time I see you, I can't remember your name, where we met or something I told you last week, don't see it as a bad thing.

It means I may finally be able to speak Japanese.